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Call it a nerd crossover, but I've always been curious about how we play games on a mechanistic level. However, even coming from a rational viewpoint video games seem like a fruitful domain of study, since data collection is simple and complete, environmental variables can be easily manipulated, and the task is far richer than typically used in cognitive psychology experiments.

So, have any psychological theories been formed by/applied to in this domain? It seems like eye-tracking and cognitive modeling approaches are both particularly well suited to this domain, but any work in cognitive science on the phenomena involved here would be interesting to see.

The only things I've found are the interesting experimental work on semantic actions in Tetris, and some modeling work done on unreal tournament within the ACT-R community. It should be noted however, that the latter example uses a video game environment as decent simulation of reality and thus models an agent inside the game, whilst the former focuses on the game from the player's point of view. This might be a personal bias, but the latter seems much more fruitful and more in line with the spirit of my question.

'Any work', seems a bit like a broad question. What particular effects are you interested in?
– Steven Jeuris♦Jan 19 '12 at 15:32

This is one of the rare cases where I'm more interested in the methodological possibilities than any specific effects per se. I figured the small domain warranted a broad question.
– zergylordJan 19 '12 at 22:13

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games (C. S. Green, D. Bavelier, 2004) is a good if somewhat dated overview of cognitive research on video game players. They note that ordinary video game users show a number of differentiated and improved mental skills:

Video game play has been shown to dramatically
enhance visuo-motor skills. In particular, video game players have been shown to
possess decreased reaction times, increased hand-eye coordination and augmented
manual dexterity. Video game play has also been shown to improve spatial skills such as
mental rotation, spatial visualization and the ability to mentally work in threedimensions. In addition, video game play has been shown to enhance numerous aspects
of visual attention including the ability to divide and switch attention, the temporal and
spatial resolution of visual attention, and the number of objects that can be attended.

The model presents seven different archetypes of players: Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind, Conqueror, Socialiser, and Achiever. We explain how each of these player archetypes relates to older player typologies (such as Myers-Briggs), and how each archetype characterizes a specific playing style. We conducted a survey among more than 50,000 players using the BrainHex model as a personality type motivator to gather and compare demographic data to the different BrainHex archetypes. We discuss some results from this survey with a focus on psychometric orientation of respondents, to establish relationships between personality types and BrainHex archetypes.

Their archetypes present an interesting insight into personality types as mapped to certain kinds of gamers.

This is a study where they used a modified version of the Quake III engine to look at a quite diverse set of variables. I find the use of Quake III to investigate navigation behavior the most interesting part of the study.

The whole of the research on this topic has some very, very serious methodological flaws, which mean there is currently surprisingly little evidence that video games or expert gamers are somehow 'special'. In particular, there are serious concerns regarding demand characteristics.

Don't just take my word for it, take a look at the extremely comprehensive and detailed paper by Boot et al. (2011).
It's open access, too!

Here's a choice quote:

One possible factor that could lead to the spurious conclusion of
gaming beneﬁts on cognition is differential expectations for experts
and novices. If gamers are recruited to a study because of their
gaming experience, they might expect to perform well because of their
expertise, and a belief that you should perform well can inﬂuence
performance on measures as basic as visual acuity (Langer et al.,
2010). Imagine that you are recruited to participate in a study
because of your gaming expertise, and the study consists of game like
computer tasks. If you know you have been recruited because you are an
expert, the demand characteristics of the experimental situation will
motivate you to try to perform well. In contrast, a non-gamer selected
without any mention of gaming will not experience such demand
characteristics, so will be less motivated. Any difference in task
performance, then, would be analogous to a placebo effect.

Almost all
studies comparing expert and novice gamers either neglect to report
how subjects were recruited or make no effort to hide the nature of
the study from participants. Many studies recruit experts through
advertisements explicitly seeking people with game experience,
thereby violating a core principle of experimental design and
introducing the potential for differential demand characteristics
(Boot et al., 2008;Colzato et al., 2010;[Karle et al., 20104). The
problem is ampliﬁed because gamers often are familiar with media and
blog coverage of the beneﬁts of gaming, so they expect to perform better when they have been recruited for their gaming expertise.

The work also reviews some of the literature regarding the psychology of computer games and a new framework for the understanding of cognition in the digital age.

I hope this helps.

Abstract:

The present paper attempts to empirically study the cognitive impacts
of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) in
uncontrolled contexts in light of the Cognitive Mediation Networks
Theory, a new model of human intelligence that aims to explain
cognition as the result of brain activity combined with the
information-processing done by external structures such as tools,
social groups and culture. A sample of 1280 students Brazilian high
school students answered a form inquiring about socio-demographic
information plus the use of computer games, and also was submitted to
a short knowledge exam and a mini psychometric test. The ﬁndings
indicated that, due to their underlying structure and sociocultural
nature, MMORPGs are associated to a greater level of insertion into
the Digital Age, higher levels of logical-numerical performance, and
better scholastic ability. Finally, suggestions are made for future
studies on the subject.

Just like brain training research - see this great recent study by Owen et al. 2010 - there is little good evidence to show any causal long term and generalisable effects of playing video games.

However, to answer the original question: I found that video game players had higher speed and reasoning ability in a small sample paper based on my PhD research developing computer-game-like ability tests. (McPherson, J., & Burns, N. R. 2008)

People who like playing games might be good at things required for playing games. Just like people who really like and are good at certain sports might often have the right skills and body type to be good at it.

The research showing training effects often involves short term improvements and tasks very similar to the training tasks - this is important. Short term non-generalisable improvements are not the same as psychological traits.

A number of researchers have done cognitive modelling using this simplified air traffic control simulator. It's not a commercial video game, but a lot of the ideas around rules and points are the same.

As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's
society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on
perceptual and motor skills. It is well known that exposing an
organism to an altered visual environment often results in
modification of the visual system of the organism. The field of
perceptual learning provides many examples of training-induced
increases in performance. But perceptual learning, when it occurs,
tends to be specific to the trained task; that is, generalization to
new tasks is rarely found1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Here we show,
by contrast, that action-video-game playing is capable of altering a
range of visual skills. Four experiments establish changes in
different aspects of visual attention in habitual video-game players
as compared with non-video-game players. In a fifth experiment,
non-players trained on an action video game show marked improvement
from their pre-training abilities, thereby establishing the role of
playing in this effect.

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.

1

Anna, could you explain a bit about how the study you cited answered the question? It would make your answer much more useful to people finding it in the future.
– Chuck SherringtonJun 17 '12 at 17:57

Nick Yee in Palo Alto is doing a lot of work with second-life and other virtual worlds looking at mostly social psychological questions. He seems to be making use of the full range of data available in the virtual world as you suggest above.

although this is self promotion in a sense, I completed a PhD in which I tried to look at all the research linking computer game performance to other cognitive abilities. The last paper published1 as a result of this summarises some of the research I found and also what I found in using computer-game-like cognitive tests.

This is a fascinating area and I think we will some great work in the near future on this. I'd love to hear of any other work out there too.